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Dropbox drops prices and ups storage to hold off competition

by Mark Tyson on 28 August 2014, 12:45

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Dropbox, arguably the most popular cloud storage service available at the moment, has announced a change in its paid offerings for its users. This is a bid to hold off heavyweight competition including the likes of Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

The company has combined its three Pro account options into a single plan, Dropbox Pro, priced at $9.99 (£7.99) a month for 1TB of storage. This new plan replaces previous Pro plans which offered 100GB, 200GB and 500GB of storage, priced respectively at $9.99, $19.99 and $49.99 per month.

Dropbox's new price plan now matches a similar Google Drive plan, which charges $9.99 for 1TB. However, Microsoft's cloud storage facilities remain the most competitive, charging $2.50 per user per month for 1TB of OneDrive capacity (for business, with an annual contract) or 1TB for $6.99 per month as part of an Office 365 Personal subscription.

"It’s how you get the content in and out and how does it let you do the work you want to accomplish," says ChenLi Wang, Dropbox’s head of product, in an interview with Wired, when asked about what's most important in the competitive cloud storage market. "We want people to rely on Dropbox as the home for all their stuff as opposed to thinking of it as a fixed storage limit."

With storage prices dropping to less than a penny per gigabyte per month, Dropbox is not really selling users storage, but its services. New features, which are already available to business users paying $15 per month, are mostly aimed at freelancers, contractors and other workers, and involve file sharing and security controls which provide users more ways to share and yet protect their files.

Users can now create passwords for shared links, set expirations for shared links, and have view-only permissions for shared folders. Another security feature for Dropbox Pro users is remote wiping, where users can delete their Dropbox files from a lost or stolen device by logging in on a different device, whilst knowing that the files are safely backed up.

With Dropbox's price drop, it leaves Amazon as the most expensive big name service in the market for now, charging $500 a year for 1TB of storage, or $41.67 a month. Even though analysts believe that price plans aren't the main concern for cloud storage customers, no provider can probably afford to ignore the going-rate market pricing forever. With Dropbox's useful new features, it looks like it can now continue to compete on service with more reasonable subscription prices to attact new customers and stem any sign of the migration of its users to other services.



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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The company has combined its three Pro account options into a single plan, Dropbox Pro, priced at $9.99 (£7.99) a month for 1TB of storage. This new plan replaces previous Pro plans which offered 100GB, 200GB and 500GB of storage, priced respectively at $9.99, $19.99 and $49.99 per month.
Actually that's one of the objections I had to upgrading my complimentary access (thanks Samsung!) to a paid-for “Pro” setup - that there was little flexibility in the pricing structure. I would have been quite happy to have a mere 100GB but couldn't see anyway of justifying paying £90+/year for the privilege.

£79 for 1TB is probably pretty good value for money, but if they'd offered smaller packages (e.g. 500GB for £45, 100GB for £10) then I would have been a lot more interested. Actually, if they'd done the £10 package then I would sign up now. As it stands I can't see a justification for 1TB of space - if anyone from Dropbox is a Hexus reader then any chance of being able to share that allocation with other members of the family?

Unfortunately, Dropbox is one of those systems that integrates near-seamlessly on my setup of Windows, Linux and Android, and other systems are a lot more work, e.g. no Google Drive client for Linux for example.
Agree with crossy, I don't need 1TB 100GB would be more than enough
I moved over to HubiC once my temporary 50GB Dropbox access expired and I've been very happy, as others say 1TB is far too much for my needs - 100GB for 1 Euro a month is perfect for my needs. It isn't the fastest but as I use my cloud storage purely to backup files I absolutely cannot lose (pictures etc) then I have no issue.

I've also just checked the website - a linux client is in Beta too.
Office 365 looks like a really good deal if you want 1TB of cloud storage, especially if you have several users at home and take the $9.99 plan.

crossy
Actually, if they'd done the £10 package then I would sign up now.

Things are moving forward for OneDrive and Google Drive, which have cheaper plans. Googling showed me that there's a way to install OneDrive on Linux, and that ‘grive’ allows syncing folders with Google Drive (though it's early software and is missing features).
ET3D
Office 365 looks like a really good deal if you want 1TB of cloud storage, especially if you have several users at home and take the $9.99 plan.

Things are moving forward for OneDrive and Google Drive, which have cheaper plans. Googling showed me that there's a way to install OneDrive on Linux, and that ‘grive’ allows syncing folders with Google Drive (though it's early software and is missing features).
Thanks I'll take a look at OneDrive, but others have remarked that Google - a company that uses Linux itself - seems to be dragging their feet over Linux support. EDIT: actually just checked out Office365 and £80 for 1TB per user plus full house Office looks like a pretty reasonable deal.

The other one that took my interest was Wuala. The initial 5GB is a bit miserly, but 10.98EUR for 105GB per month seems okay to me. And that's about £9, is cross-platform and encrypts locally (NSA resistant?)

If Hexus are short of article fodder then one comparing these cloud-storage systems might be handy.